Tag Archives: money

This isn’t a ‘4 steps to beating piracy guide’, but we might as well start at the beginning. Prepare a game plan for your music. Figure out what path you want to take with your music and then stick to it. Do you want to get your music out in the world trying to get the most people to hear it, or do you need to make a monetary return on your recording investment? If you need to make a return, don’t give away your music for free, expecting some people to pay or donate. If your goal is awareness and popularity, then giving away a bunch of songs or the entire album may be the way to go.

Interesting. I had a discussion with a bass player about things like Spotify and Pandora. He was all “they pay you” and I was “like .000001 cents per play”. I think the way to go is to either put it into iTunes, or perhaps do what some people are doing and make it a “pay what you want” thing.

UPDATE – Actually, the rate is $0.21 per 100 streams of a song. And Pandora supposedly pays $0.12 per 100 streams.

This was an interesting case because ASCAP wants to charge twice essentially. I dunno. Music should be priced fairly and then you can do whatever you want with it. If you play it for an audience, then you should pay the fees associated. But ASCAP was trying to tack that fee on to downloads regardless of if it was actually played for audiences or not.

The US Supreme Court late Monday rejected ASCAP’s attempt to claim that song downloads are public performances. Its verdict upheld an earlier appeal ruling without added comment. The earlier, federal-level judge pointed to basic logic for support, contending that a digital recording isn’t necessarily being played live to a wide audience just because it had been transferred over the Internet….

MakeMusic announced today that they are going to be charging for Finale Notepad 2009, which for almost 8 years has been a free product.“In the next few weeks we plan to release Finale NotePad 2009 with even more features, including an all new Expression Tool and the ability to import/export MusicXML files. It will continue to include free online support. At the same time we will begin charging $9.95 for the NotePad 2009 download.”

Ooo, Online support? XML importing? Wow. Sign me up. NOT.

Meanwhile, get Finale Notepad 2008 while you can. Finale 2009 is a downgrade. Staff Lists limited to 4 (used to be unlimited). Most of TGTools handy utilities do not work (Align/Move, which I use a lot) because of “new” Expression tool. *sigh*. Just avoid it. Unless they are going to be including Garritan sounds with it (hahahaha, yeah, right), $9.95 for their new expression tool and XML importing?

MakeMusic needs to cut down on the number of products it has. It has Finale, Finale Allegro, PrintMusic, Songwriter, Notepad and SmartMusic. Just keep Notepad free, drop Songwriter, drop the price of PrintMusic to $60, and drop Allegro to like $150. Simple.

In a major win for record companies seeking to establish precedent for prosecuting those who trade copyrighted material on the Internet, a federal jury awarded six firms $222,000 in damages from a Minnesota woman who shared music online. Jammie Thomas, 30, was ordered to pay $9,250 for each of 24 songs that were part of the case. The complaint alleged that she had shared 1,702 copyright-violating songs online. The Associated Press quotes Richard Gabriel, lead attorney for the music companies: “This does send a message, I hope, that downloading and distributing our recordings is not OK.”